Microsoft's Bing market share jump: Too little, too late
- TAGS:deal Yahoo, Microsoft
- IT TOPICS:E-Business & Web 2.0, Internet, Operating Systems, Software, Windows & Microsoft
Microsoft has good reason to be pleased with recent figures that show Bing has a nearly 10% share of the search market, nearly 31% higher than a year previous. But it still lags far behind Google, which has 65.4% of the market. If the goal is to catch Google, it will never happen.
Bing's share of the search market was 9.9% in October, up from 9.4% in September, reports ComScore. Back in May, it was at 8%. That translates into nearly a 25% increase in five months. The increase is even more impressive when you consider that until May, Microsoft's market share was heading south. It was 8.5% in January, slid to 8% in May, and has rebounded since then, largely because of the launch of Bing, Microsoft's redesigned search.
Bing is an impressive piece of work. It's fast, does an excellent job of finding the best search matches, and includes some very nifty features. If Bing and Google started off with equal market share, I think their market share would stay neck and neck. Bing is that good.
But they're not starting off neck and neck. Bing was released in June, and at that point, it had an 8.4% market share, compared to Google's 65%. Since June, Bing has gone to 9.9%, while Google has been largely flat, and in October had a 65.4% market share. Bing appears to be taking market share away from Yahoo, which fell to 18% in October, from 18.8% in September. Back in January, Yahoo was at 21%.
Google's lead is simply too large for Bing, and Microsoft will never catch up. But Microsoft doesn't necessarily need to catch Google in order to succeed with Bing. The search market is very large and very profitable, and even taking a relatively small slice means a substantial amount of revenue.



